{"id":1359,"date":"2007-08-23T15:40:53","date_gmt":"2007-08-23T20:40:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/2007\/08\/23\/the-best-arguments-for-things-i-dont-believe\/"},"modified":"2007-08-23T15:40:53","modified_gmt":"2007-08-23T20:40:53","slug":"the-best-arguments-for-things-i-dont-believe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2007\/08\/23\/the-best-arguments-for-things-i-dont-believe\/","title":{"rendered":"The Best Arguments for Things I Don’t Believe"},"content":{"rendered":"

Have you ever heard someone arguing in favor of a position with which you disagree, but their arguments are so bad that you can’t help but think “Man, I could do a better job arguing for their side than they are, and I don’t even agree with them!” I thought it might be interesting to do exactly that — consider some interesting issues, and come up with my own versions of what the people who I think are wrong should<\/em> be saying.<\/p>\n

The rules would be: (1) The claims would be somewhat judgmental, rather than straightforwardly empirical. I’m not going to waste my time arguing that the universe is not expanding<\/a>, or anything like that. (2) I have to stick to making individual statements that I really do believe, even if I don’t think they are sufficient to support the ultimate conclusion. I reserve the right to come up with more rules as I think of them.<\/p>\n

Here are some possible claims to be considered:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. God exists.<\/li>\n
  2. The Iraq war was a good idea.<\/li>\n
  3. Women scientists shouldn’t complain about discrimination.<\/li>\n
  4. Research on string theory is a waste of time.<\/li>\n
  5. Talking about the multiverse is intrinsically non-scientific.<\/li>\n
  6. We shouldn’t worry about global climate change.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Any other suggestions? I’m sure there are lots of things I don’t believe, but could come up with better arguments for than I usually hear. It’ll be like being on the debate team again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Have you ever heard someone arguing in favor of a position with which you disagree, but their arguments are so bad that you can’t help but think “Man, I could do a better job arguing for their side than they are, and I don’t even agree with them!” I thought it might be interesting to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellany"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1359","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1359"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1359\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}